Reel 5: March 2, 1954/Transcript
This is the official transcript for the episode which can also be accessed for free at'' patreon.com/withinthewires''Amy, did you - Was there someone outside our office just now? I just thought I heard something. Someone speaking. When I peeked out the window, there were two people with a dog. It looked like a dog, leaving the front of our buildings. Did you speak to them? Am I imagining. No. Nevermind. I thought I smelled cigarette smoke. You don’t smoke do you Amy? # # # Letter from the office of Michael Witten, on March 2, 1954 to Sarah Chisholm, Public Works Department, Philadelphia Office Dear Sarah, I’m writing to check on your progress in regards to the plans we had discussed. I have received concerning news that - no, no. I’ve urged caution in the past, and I wanted to reiterate - goddammit, no. Dear Sarah, I’m writing to update you on my progress with our plans for the complex in Washington. It’s looking likely that things at my end may be delayed due to - Fuck. Dear Sarah… Dear Sarah, It’s possible that all I need from you at the present is some reassurance. I’m beginning to be concerned - No. Alarmed. No. Dear Sarah, did you hire KR Development to work on our Washington revitalization plans? Because I sure as hell didn’t. Dear Sarah, I’m being followed, are you being followed, because I think I’m being followed. Dear Sarah, I don’t know who to trust. Amy. Don’t send any of that. I’m just. I could’ve sworn I saw someone - # # # (Amy. Let’s try coming in through the back door on this one.) Letter from the office of Michael Witten, on March 2, 1954 to Sarah Chisholm, Public Works Department, Philadelphia Office Dear Sarah, I am writing in order to update you on our progress with our local push to refurbish and, in some cases, build new, fully equipped Identification Centres throughout Chicago. I remember you mentioning in passing some months ago that you were concerned about the difficulty obtaining up to date IDs can be for some people, and that you were thinking about what could be done to alleviate the stress. We have recently been reviewing our plans in this area, and I wondered if you might find them helpful in considering your own. Our first priority is to make sure there are plenty of locations for this service - rather than having one or two big venues that will entail a lot of travel and long wait times. The ideal is that no city-dwelling person should have to travel for more than twenty minutes to get to a service centre, and they shouldn’t have to wait longer than ten minutes to begin their application. The process itself can take some time, of course, but there’s no help for that if we want it to be both thorough and comfortable. Dedicated photographers will be on site at all times, of course, so applicants don’t need to arrange their own photos separately, and they will be able to spend time with each person to ensure they get a photo they’re moderately happy with - a small favour to ask considering each ID is expected to last for ten years. In addition there will be a small cafe attached to each centre, so applicants can have coffee in a pleasant environment while waiting for their application to be processed, or while they fill out the required forms. We are working to make sure the entire centre is as pleasant an environment as possible, of course, but the cafe will work as an extension of that. There will be one bigger centre in the middle of the city as well, that will contain additional supports, such as translators and aides to help those with accessibility issues - while these staff will be predominantly stationed in the central hub, they will be made available to travel to the smaller, local centres by prior arrangement. I hope this is helpful to you. I am always happy to share with other offices our successes and challenges, so that we all may learn and grow. As I have told others, this is community, not competition. Of course, as often happens, there have been unexpected complications on our road to planning and building these centres. There have been delays. We have been delayed. We have often been delayed for reasons that were outside our control, and not directly related to this particular project. That’s life, I suppose. That’s bureaucracy. Someone or something is always delaying some such. We experienced this - you and I - with the Washington revitalization. First were the newspaper reporters. Then the Council’s Budget Committee. Then an unnamed corporation tried to buy up all of the buildings while we were stalled. Sarah, did you ever see the bid sheets for that purchase? I was told we were going to lose the land - and all those beautiful old buildings - to a private company, but before the Societal Council could get around to meeting to even discuss the possibility of arguing over the process of negotiations for considering the conditional sale of unowned land, the bidder just disappeared. No more interest. The land - and all those beautiful old buildings - remained ours to do with as we wish. And I wish to do a lot with them. But we’re stalled. And that’s my fault. I honestly haven’t been pushing as hard to file the paperwork to move forward. It’s not that I’m not interested in building public housing, Sarah, nor in cultural development and accessible health centers. I’m interested in those. What I’m not interested in is using my department’s money to fund KR Development, which has contracted rights to this redevelopment project. Did you sign off on this, Sarah? We don’t have unions anymore, which I understand is part of the New Society’s dedication to eradicating tribalism. But we still have corporations, don’t we. We still have governments. We should still have fair and equal representation. We should still have unions. And the people who made up those unions still need work. They’re in Washington and Baltimore and Fairfax. All the way down to Atlanta, I have contractors and engineers and day laborers who will come and do this job. KR Development isn’t going to hire them because they do good work and charge for it. Plus, KR hasn’t shown us all of their documentation. I have an abstract about what they’re building, but they seem to be making sure we cannot closely monitor it. I don’t see mention of public housing in here, nor a dance studio. I can’t trust this. I hope you appreciate my tremendous concerns about the Washington revitalization. I hope I can count on your extra eyes on KR Development so that we can get this project going. Sorry for the tangent. This was about your concerns, not mine. Thank you for seeking advice from me about our new Identification Centers. As you begin planning your own Identification Centres, expect to be delayed, and not to know for some time how long the delay might last. All my best, Michael # # # How long have you worked here, Amy? How long have we worked together? You haven’t worked with me that long. A year? Two years? Three? It always feels like the current state of things - whatever that state might be - is just the way things have always been. The way they will always be. But that is an illusion, of course, things have beginnings and ends. It’s just that beginnings and endings only really matter when they’re happening. Middles are eternal. So you haven’t worked for me for very long, all things considered. You are not even close to the longest serving assistant I’ve had. That was Kevin Prince, who was terrible. You’re not terrible. You’re excellent. The finest. I stuck with Kevin for almost 6 years. I guess I liked being in control. I couldn’t trust him specifically with things like spelling politicians’ names right, or knowing how to dial a phone, or remembering where the filing cabinets were. But I trusted him generally. I knew he wouldn’t betray me. He wouldn’t turn on me to get a better job or out of revenge for some perceived slight all underlings blow up into great attacks on their pride. No, I couldn’t trust Kevin with getting work done, but I could trust him with my livelihood. That’s a good quality. Like I said, you’re way better at your job, though. I hope you’ll be around much longer than Kevin as my assistant. Or secretary. Whatever your real job title is. # # # It’s funny how you find yourself in a relationship with someone - professional, personal. A companion, a mentor. You find yourself in these relationships and suddenly they seem natural. They feel like they’re built on some kind of foundations. They feel like they have a depth that will make them unassailable. Safe. But I’m not sure they do, much of the time. I’m not sure it’s not just the result of familiarity. If you see someone every week, every day, you begin to make assumptions about who they are to you. My boss when I moved to Saint Louis was named (is named - probably still is named) Patricia Terhune. She was from Tulsa. I was like you, Amy. I wrote letters, and filed letters, and made coffee. We sold textiles. I used to work in the fulfillment warehouse, but I moved to the fancy white collar office. And Patricia was head of sales. Our staff would go to struggling businesses and convince them to spend money they didn’t need to spend on things like welcome mats or hand towels. I told myself this was a good thing, because I was helping the workers of the manufacturing industry. If we think of the new Society as a body, it’s easy to compare workers and makers to hands, and management or government as brains. But I think workers are the DNA. Do you know what DNA is? I read an article about this woman in Cambridge who discovered that inside our cells are like a blueprint of us. I don’t fully get it. Vivienne gets so delighted by new science. I read it so we would have something to talk about over breakfast. But DNA is the list of things we are to become. If you had bad DNA I suppose, you would not turn out right. If you had good DNA, you’d be a superhuman. Again, this is like jazz. I should be more culturally literate. The point is workers have always been the DNA of Society’s body. If you have well-paid, well-treated workers, you will become a super society. Poorly respected workers are a sure sign of an unhealthy one. Patricia talked to us all like we were imbeciles, and we all hated our jobs, but we all had jobs, and in the short-term that is more important than happiness. I feared making mistakes, but I feared doing a good job as well. Even if I performed exactly what she asked, she could decide it wasn’t what she wanted at all, and then take that out on me. I kept a journal. It was only for myself, to talk about my feelings, to list everything she said or did, another excellent recommendation from Vivi. After a year of this, I re-read what I had wrote. Maybe I’m a masochist, but it felt therapeutic to realize it wasn’t all my fault, that Patricia was the monster, not me. In going back through these entries, I noticed she had once scolded me for not paying close enough attention to our books. There had been a miscalculation, and I debited something I should have credited. It was a small amount, but a valid mistake. She tore the page out, marked it up and told me to redo it correctly. I even folded that sheet in half and placed it in my journal. Three months later, she took me off the books, despite having done a flawless job. She decided to manage them herself. But after only a few months, she handed the accounting back to me. Upon re-reading these exchanges, it struck me as an odd behavior. I still had that torn out page Patricia had marked up, and I compared it to the page I had supposedly redone. It was then I realized that none of the handwriting from those dates matched. In fact, page after page from the earlier time when I handled the books was not in my handwriting. And the numbers were wrong, just a few dollars here and there were changed. So. I spent several late nights reconciling invoices and receipts to our books. I put together a file demonstrating that she had defrauded our company of more than three thousand dollars in a 6 month period. She was fired and arrested. And that’s how I got my promotion. The charges never stuck to her, though. Turns out she was able to account for most of the money. She didn’t take any; she was just terrible at bookkeeping, so full of disdain for me that she changed everything I had done behind my back. Her rage made her incompetent, not criminal. We make a lot of assumptions when we think we know someone. An assistant is privy to a lot of private things. Or a secretary. She sees a lot. Somehow the fact that she sees these secrets, these moments of privacy, the fact of it makes you think she must be worthy of seeing them. She must be someone you can trust, because you have already trusted her. But when did that trust really get built? Also, I saw on your notepad this morning that those journalists from Vancouver called again. You wrote that they had questions about Vishwathi using survey data to discriminate against certain businesses? Thank you for not passing the calls to me. Did you have any intention of telling me they called, though? Did you ever find the Vancouver files? ### Order me in some dinner please, Amy, I don’t quite feel like going out. I’m afraid - The weather’s not great, I’d rather stay indoors. Something hot, I think. Something nourishing - what’s that nice place down the road with the pasta? Order me something from there, some pasta and a salad. And make me an espresso, would you? Make me a couple of espressos. # # # Was there someone outside? When you came in was there someone standing a little too near the door? Wearing a hat low over their eyes? Standing with a dog? Why would someone like that be near the door, standing there. # # # I mean, there could be any number of reasons, of course. They were probably just taking a moment under the awning to light a cigarette. They were probably just checking the address they were heading to in their diary. I’m probably not being followed. I think I’m being followed. Category:Transcripts